Today is my birthday, so I decided to celebrate I’ll watch that Han Solo movie.
Here it is…
A western with mummies, Indiana Jones-style
My own birthday gift to myself arrived this morning, one day earlier than expected.
It’s a novel, published by Angry Robot. It’s called Fury of the Dead, and it was written by S.A. Sidor. It is the first in a series of books about The Institute for Singular Antiquities.
The plot in a nutshell: 1888, an archaeologist loses his load of cursed mummies while crossing the United States by train from New York to Los Angeles,and has to go south of the border, with a back-up team including a Chinese boy, a gunslinger and a tough lady, to get his angry dead back again.
You can see why I wanted this book from the moment I set my sights on the cover.
Indeed, I do have a certain professional interest in mummies and Egyptian curses, and it feels all right, now that AMARNA is almost in the can1, to distract myself by reading some other cursed mummy book.
And then, it’s my birthday, right?
And I am really curious to see how the author handled certain issues.
I might post on the subject, later on.
Meanwhile, I’ll be spending this rainy afternoon under the porch, reading about cursed Egyptian mummies and gunslingers.
- Edpisode 5 is coming soon! ↩
Gardner Dozois, 1947-2018
Six years ago, when I first self-published a science fiction story of mine, a guy on Facebook told me he would only read my work the day it would be selected by Gardner Dozois for one of his anthologies.
Then, and no sooner, he told me, he would be convinced my work was worth reading. Until then, he could not care less.
Gardner Dozois, one of the greatest editors ever to grace the field of science fiction, passed away yesterday. He was 71.
His output as an editor of anthologies is such that it will be impossible to summarize it here.
But check out this tidbit of information from Wikipedia:
Stories selected by Gardner Dozois for the annual best-of-year volumes have won, as of December 2015, 44 Hugos, 41 Nebulas, 32 Locus, 10 World Fantasy and 18 Sturgeon Awards.
And he loved old space opera and adventure science fiction, which is the reason why I will remember him today by reading the last anthology of his that I purchased: Old Mars.
Gardner Dozois contributed to make me what I am.
He will be sorely missed.
Three for the Long Shadows
This is the Weekend of Long Shadows, as we celebrate the birthdays of Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and Vincent Price.
I will not bore you explaining how much these three gentlemen kept me company as a kid. There was a time when their movies were everywhere and at least once a week you’d be able to catch on of their works on the TV.
To celebrate these old friends, I’ll be re-watching three of their movies today.
First, The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas, featuring Peter Cushing.
Then, The Mummy, featuring both Cushing and Christopher Lee.
And finally, The Raven, with Vincent Price (and Boris Karloff, and Peter Lorre, and Jack Nicholson…)
It’s going to be a good day.
Jack the Giant Killer, 1962
I discovered a few hours ago that there exists in the Internet Archive an acceptable copy of Jack the Giant Killer, a 1962 fantasy movie, loosely based on the classic folk tale, and one of my childhood’s fond memories.
So I went and re-watched it.
The movie features the same stars (Kerwin Mathews and Thorin Thatcher) and the same director (Nathan Juran) as The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, as the producer – who had rejected the Harryhausen project – tried to cash-in on that movie’s success. Many viewers today do in fact consider Jack as a rip-off of Sinbad, down to the sub-par Harryhausen-esque special effects.
But this is in my opinion a too harsh evaluation. Continue reading
Reading on Latin obscenities
As I crawl towards my fifty-first birthday, friends are starting to hit me with gifts. Books and records, mostly, because they know what I like.
And so here I am with a small booklet that promises to up my game in a very specific field – that of ancient profanities.
Come insultavano gli antichi, that is How the ancients insulted is a small collection of profanities, extracted from Greek and Latin sources, showing a fine (well, maybe fine is not the right word) selection of bad words and obscene phrases.
Saying bad words in Greek and Latin the subtitle reads, and the book does in fact include the original texts for reference.
Time to finish this one, and I think I’ll be ready for another post on the subject – the topic seems to be much appreciated by the readers out there, after all.
Serendipity of sorts: the Thirty Years War
“See you in Prague,” Graham Nash used to say – and today marks the 400th anniversary of the Defenestration of Prague, a rather obscure to most but pretty violent episode of European History that traditionally marks the start of the Thirty Years War.
Now, I am quite fond of the Thirty Years War, and this despite the fact that Continue reading
Karavansara 